Collaborative wideband sensing for cognitive radios: An overview of challenges and solutions

Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising technology to revolutionize spectrum utilization in wireless communications. In a CR network, secondary users continuously sense the spectral environment and adapt transmission parameters to opportunistically use the available spectrum. A fundamental problem for CRs is spectrum sensing; secondary users need to reliably detect weak primary signals of possibly different types over a targeted wide frequency band in order to identify spectral holes for opportunistic communications. Conceptually and practically, there is growing awareness that collaboration among several CRs can achieve considerable performance gains. This article provides an overview of the challenges and possible solutions for the design of collaborative wideband sensing in CR networks. It is argued that collaborative spectrum sensing can make use of signal processing gains at the physical layer to mitigate strict requirements on the radio frequency front-end and to exploit spatial diversity through network cooperation to significantly improve sensing reliability.